1 Introduction

This document estimates yearly-trends in the Proportion of Illegally Killed Elephants (PIKE) from MIKE (Monitoring Illegally Killed Elephants) monitoring sites in Asia since 2003. Many of the technical details are explained in the technical document prepared for the analysis of the Africa data and are not repeated here.

Briefly, MIKE data is collected on an annual basis in designated MIKE sites by law enforcement and ranger patrols in the field and through other means. When an elephant carcass is found, site personnel try to establish the cause of death and other details, such as sex and age of the animal, status of ivory, and stage of decomposition of the carcass. This information is recorded in standardized carcass forms, details of which are then submitted to the MIKE Programme. As expected, different sites report widely different numbers of carcasses, as encountered carcass numbers are a function of: population abundance; natural mortality rates; the detection probabilities of elephant carcasses in different habitats; differential carcass decay rates; levels of illegal killing; and levels of search effort and site coverage. Because of these features of the survey data, the number of carcasses found is unlikely to be proportional to the total mortality and trends in observed numbers of illegally killed elephants may not be informative of the underlying trends.

Consequently, the observed proportion of illegally killed elephants (PIKE) as an index of poaching levels has been used in the MIKE analysis in an attempt to account for differences in patrol effort between sites and over time: \[PIKE_{sy}=\frac{\textit{Number of illegally killed elephants}_{sy}}{\textit{Total Carcasses Examined}_{sy}}\] where the subscripts \(sy\) refer to site and year respectively.

Computing a continent-wide PIKE is challenging for several reasons, including as mentioned above:

1.1 PIKE as an index of poaching pressure

The value of PIKE computed by LSMeans and the GLMM approach should be considered as an INDEX of poaching pressure. We hope that trends in the index reflect trends in the actual levels of poaching. Converting the value of PIKE into a measure of actual poaching mortality is complicated due to the following:

  • Effects of changing natural mortality over time are confounded with changes in PIKE.
  • MIKE sites are not selected at random and so the marginal mean PIKE may not be representative of the actual marginal mean PIKE.
  • Poaching at MIKE sites may not be representative of poaching in areas outside of the MIKE site.
  • The unweighted marginal mean PIKE gives equal weight to every MIKE site. We have investigated in this report the impact of weighting sites by the population abundance of elephants associated with that site, but have not included estimates of uncertainty in the population abundance estimates.
  • There are a number of issues with the collection of the data such as:
    • Management related deaths are included in the number of carcasses examined (the denominator of PIKE) at this point in time;
    • search patterns are not random and often directed to illegally killed elephants;
    • misclassification of animals as unknown causes of mortality rather than illegally or natural mortality based on the preponderance of evidence;
    • errors in the data

The CITES MIKE CCU is preparing a discussion paper that explores data issues in more detail.

For these reasons, great care should to be taken and assumptions should be well documented when converting the estimated PIKE to actual levels of poaching mortality.

2 Exploration of PIKE data

2.1 MIKE sites with PIKE data

There are 30 MIKE sites in Asia broken into 2 subregions: South East Asia (SE) & South Asia (SS).

There are 30 MIKE sites that have reported data on the number of carcasses found and the number of illegally killed carcasses among these. This includes 55 site-years where sites have reported 0 carcasses and 254 site-years where sites have reported one or more elephant carcasses.

The current analysis treats site that did not report on any carcasses in a year (no patrol effort) and a site that reports 0 carcasses examined in year (patrol effort but no carcasses found) in the same way. This is because information on patrol effort is not currently used in the analysis and only the number of carcasses examined and the number of illegally killed elephants in the sample of carcasses is used. In the latter case, 0 illegal carcasses out of 0 carcasses examined gives a PIKE for that site-year of 0/0 which is indeterminate and cannot be used in any mathematical analysis of PIKE.

The following plot shows that there are some sites that have reported data for at least one carcass in as little as one year, but other sites have reported data for at least one carcass in almost every year.

In total, there are 254 unique site-years in Asia since 2003 where data has been reported (and the number of reported carcasses > 0).

The number of carcasses reported in each site-year since 2003 varies enormously from 1 to 202 carcasses.

2.2 Observed PIKE

The observed PIKE is the value computed from the examined carcasses in a year which we hope reflects the actual PIKE for all elephants at the MIKE site. A plot of the observed PIKE values from each site-year shows a wide range in the observed PIKE values, but many of the observed PIKE values close to 0 or 1 occur in sites with only a small number of carcasses examined in a year:

Data is extremely sparse for the South East Asia subregion with only a handful of carcasses measured in each year with many observed PIKE values of 0 or 1.

The trend in observed PIKE values for each site is:

Note that with a small number of carcasses reported (e.g. 0 or 1) it is quite common for the reported PIKE to be 0 or 1 because either none or all of the carcasses have been illegally killed. Consequently, the trends are difficult to interpret for many sites with only a few carcasses reported.

2.3 Final dataset used

The final data set consists of 28 MIKE sites from 2003 to 2019 over the subregions as shown below:

Summary of MIKE sites used in analysis
Subregion Name Number of sites # Site-Years Mean # carcasses reported per year Site IDs
South Asia 15 158 23.1 CHR, CHU, DEO, DHG, EDO, GRO, MBJ, MYS, NIL, SCH, SUK, SVK, WPT, WYD, YAL
South East Asia 13 96 2.4 ALW, BBS, CTN, GMS, KLU, KUI, MKR, NAK, NPH, SHW, SKP, WAY, XBN

3 The Bayesian model

3.1 Binomial variation within each site-year

In each site-year, the number of illegally killed elephant carcasses is a fraction of the total elephant carcasses examined. Consequently, we use a binomial distribution to model this part of the data:

\[IC_{sy} \sim Binomial(TC_{sy}, \pi_{sy})\] where \(IC_{sy}\) is the number of illegally killed carcasses reported from site \(s\) in year \(y\); \(TC_{sy}\) is the total number of carcasses located as reported from site \(s\) in year \(y\); and \(\pi_{sy}\) is the probability that a reported carcass was defined as illegally killed in site \(s\) in year \(y\).

3.2 Temporal and site effects

The value of \(\pi_{sy}\) (the PIKE in site \(s\) and year \(y\)) varies by time (temporal trends), by site (site effects) and over time within each site (site-year effects). Here is a key difference from the previous LSMeans models. The LSMeans model used sub-region as the unit of analysis for the continental estimates and country as the unit of analysis for the sub-regional estimates and gave each unit of analysis an equal weight when computing the aggregate estimate. In the Bayesian model, the site is the unit of analysis and the Bayesian model gives each site equal weight when aggregating to larger units (continental or subregional).

Because, the PIKE must be between 0 and 1, it is modelled on the logistic scale. Similar to (but not exactly the same as) Burn, Underwood and Blanc (2011), a Bayesian hierarchical model is adopted of the form: \[logit(\pi_{sy})= Year_y + Site_s(R) + SiteYear_{sy}(R)\] where \(Year_y\) is the effect of year \(y\) on the \(logit(PIKE)\); \(Site_s(R)\) is the (random) effect of site \(s\) on the \(logit(PIKE)\); and \(SiteYear_{sy}(R)\) is the (random) effect of site \(s\) in year \(y\) on the \(logit(PIKE)\).

Here \(year\) is not modelled in a hierarchical fashion because we are interested in these particular years and do not believe that these years represent a (theoretical) sample from all possible years.

The random effects of site and site-year are modelled using a hierarchical model, i.e. \[Site_s \sim Normal(0, \sigma_{site})\] and \[SiteYear_{sy} \sim Normal(0, \sigma_{site.year})\]

Here the \(Year_y\) effects represents the average \(logit(PIKE)\) over all sites giving each site an equal weight, analogous to the least-square means reported in previous analyses.

3.3 Marginal mean PIKE

Once the model is fit, the estimated \(logit(PIKE)\) for all sites and years where no data are collected is found as: \[\widehat{logit(\pi_{sy})}= \widehat{Year}_y + \widehat{Site}_s + \widehat{SiteYear}_{sy}\] Note that if no data are collected in a particular site-year, the estimated PIKE is based purely on the estimated value from other years. Because all \(Site.Year\) effects are assumed to be independent among and within sites, so their values must be simulated from the posterior distribution.

Once the estimated site-year values are obtained, the marginal means are found in three ways:

  1. The marginal mean on the logit scale \[MM_y^{logit} = \frac{\sum_s {\widehat{logit(\pi_{sy})} }}{s}\] where \(s\) is the number of sites.

This marginal mean can also be interpreted as the \(logit(PIKE)\) when the \(Site\) and \(Site.Year\) effects are zero, i.e. for an ``average site’’.

This marginal mean can be back transformed to the [0,1] scale. Because the \(logit()\) scale is a non-linear transformation of the [0,1] scale, this (default) method of computing a marginal mean is greatly influenced by \(logit()\) values from PIKE that are close to 0 or 1, i.e., \(logit(0)=-\infty\) and \(logit(1)=+\infty\). Consequently, this marginal mean is not recommended for use.

  1. The marginal mean on the probability (i.e. the 0-1) scale \[MM_y^{unweighted} = \frac{\sum_s{\widehat{\pi}_{sy}}}{s}\] This is closest to the marginal means computed in the prior analysis (the LSMeans approach) and is the recommended approach for computing the unweighted marginal mean.

3.4 Uncertainty about marginal mean PIKE

There are three sources of uncertainty that need to be considered when estimating the uncertainty about the marginal mean PIKE:

  • choice of MIKE sites
  • imputation of missing PIKE in year.sites where no data is collected
  • estimation of PIKE in a year.site when only a small number of carcasses is measured.

If you believe that MIKE sites were chosen at random from a larger population of MIKE sites and you need to account for this initial selection of sites, then all three sources of uncertainty need to be incorporated into the estimates.

However, MIKE sites were selected to be representative of most major populations of elephants and the notion of a new sample of MIKE sites may not be realistic. In this case, the MIKE sites are ``fixed’’ and only the last two elements of uncertainty need to be incorporated.

The differences between these two interpretations can be made clearer if asked what uncertainty should be reported if all MIKES reported in all years and had perfect information, i.e. the mortality of every single mortality in the associated population is known. If you believe that the current MIKE sites are a random sample from many potential MIKE sites, then there is sampling uncertainty associated with the marginal mean. If you believe that the current set of MIKE sites is fixed and representative, then marginal mean PIKE would then have an uncertainty of 0.

This issue is explored in more detail in Appendix 2 in the original technical document.

It turns out that finding the uncertainty when MIKE sites are treated as “fixed” is automatically provided by the Bayesian analysis and no further computations are needed.

If the MIKE sites are to be treated as a random sample of sites taken from a larger population of MIKE sites, then the Bayesian uncertainty associated with the Year.eff term on the logit scale automatically incorporates all three sources of uncertainty. However, as noted previously and later in the document, you cannot simple take the anti-logit of the Year.eff to get the marginal mean PIKE on the [0,1] scale with the proper accounting of uncertainty because of the transformation bias induced by the anti-logit transform.

We derived the uncertainty of the marginal mean PIKE on the [0,1] scale accounting for a random sample of sites and correcting for the transformation bias, by using Bayesian Bootstrapping (Rubin, 1981; https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/181350/bootstrapping-vs-bayesian-bootstrapping-conceptually). For each sample from the posterior, the year.site values for PIKE on the logit scale (accounting for uncertainty from a sample of carcasses and imputation for missing year.site values), are converted to the [0,1] scale. A sample of weights is generated from a Dirichlet distribution with prior weights all set to 1. The sample of weights are then used to compute a weighted average of the year.site values on the [0,1] scale.

More formally, \[\textbf{w}\sim Dirichlet(1,1,1,....1_{Nsites})\] \[MM_y^{BB,unweighted} = \sum_s{w_i \times \widehat{\pi}_{sy}}\] The posterior distribution of the Bayesian bootstrap estimator will then account for all sources of uncertainty.

6 Model assessment

We performed model assessments of the model at the continental level and expect that similar findings will occur at the sub-regional levels.

6.1 Mixing of chains

The Gelman and Rubin’s potential scale reduction factor statistic (\(\widehat{R}\); Gelman et al, 2013) measures the relative variation in an estimated parameter among the multiple chains and the variation within a chain. Models should have value of \(\widehat{R}\) close to 1 indicating that the posterior space covered by each chain is very similar. The effective sample size is an adjustment to the number of samples in the posterior for autocorrelation. If successive samples from the posterior have a high autocorrelation, then 10 samples from the posterior provide only incremental information over a single sample from the posterior. The effective sample should be reasonably large for all posterior samples to ensure that the posterior mean, standard deviation, and credible intervals are well estimated.

We examined \(\widehat{R}\) and the effective sample size for several parameter sets:

Rhat and Effective sample size for several parameter sets
Effect Max Rhat Max N.eff Min N.eff
SD Site effects 1.007 340 340
SD Year Site effects 1.007 360 360
Site Effects 1.007 4500 330
Year Effects 1.006 4500 380

Mixing appears to be adequate with small values of \(\widehat{R}\) in all parameter sets.

The effective sample size is small (<500) for 2 sites. The sites with small effective sample sizes are:

Sites with small effective sample sizes
MIKE site Avg PIKE Site effect Rhat N eff
SVK 0.05 -2.16 1.006 380
WYD 0.06 -2.06 1.007 330

Sites with small effective sample sizes, tend to have PIKE that are very much larger or very much smaller than the average PIKE as estimated by their site effect. In particular, a site with a PIKE close to 0 or 1 will have a site effect with very small uncertainty and so repeated samples from the posterior will all be very similar. Mixing was adequate (as measured by \(\widehat{R}\)) and so these low effective sample sizes are acceptable.

6.2 Examination of trace plots

Trace plots were constructed for the yearly estimates of PIKE on the logit scale:

Similarly, trace plots were constructed for the estimated standard deviation of the \(site\) and \(site.year\) effects on the logit scale:

All plots show good evidence of mixing of the three chains sampled from the posterior.

6.3 Omnibus goodness of fit

An omnibus goodness-of-fit test can be constructed using Bayesian Predictive Plot (Gellman et al, 2013). For each sample from the posterior, the Tukey-Freeman statistic (Freeman and Tukey, 1950) is computed using the observed data and a simulated data based on the posterior sample. The Tukey-Freeman statistic is less sensitive to small observed and expected values than the usual chi-square goodness-of-fit test.

For example, for a particular value of the posterior sample, the observed Tukey-Freeman statistic is found as the difference between the observed number of illegally killed elephants and the expected number of illegally killed elephants: \[TF.obs = \sum_{site.years}{ (\sqrt{IC_{site.year}}-\sqrt{TC_{site.year}\times\pi_{site.year}})^2}\] The simulated Tukey-Freeman statistic is found as the difference between a simulated number of illegally killed elephants and the expected number of illegally killed elephants: \[IC.sim_{site.year} \sim Binomial( TC_{site.year}\times \pi_{site.year})\] \[TF.sim = \sum_{site.years}{ (\sqrt{IC.sim_{site.year}}-\sqrt{TC_{site.year}\times \pi_{site.year}})^2}\] The value of the \(TF.obs\) is plotted against the corresponding \(TF.sim\) and the proportion of times that the observer Tukey-Freeman statistic exceeds the simulated Tukey-Freeman statistic is known as the Bayesian p-value. If the model fits well, then these two measures should be similar and the Bayesian p-value will be close to 0.5. If there is lack of fit, then the two measures will be discordant, and the Bayesian p-value will be close to 0 or 1.

The Bayesian Posterior Predictive plot for the omnibus goodness of fit is:

Because the Bayesian p-value is not extreme, the fit is deemed acceptable;

6.4 Over dispersion

6.4.1 General over dispersion

A general measure of over dispersion is to compute a statistic that compares the expected number of illegally killed elephants based on the fitted site-year PIKE with the observed number of illegally killed elephants.

\[Disperson = \sum_{sy}{\frac{(TC_{sy}\times\widehat{\pi}_{sy}-IC_{sy})^2}{TC_{sy}\times\widehat{\pi}_{sy}}}\] There are 254 site-year data points in the sum above.

This is traditionally divided by the \((\textit{number of data points} - \textit{the number of estimated parameters})\). However, in Bayesian hierarchical models (such as this), the number of parameters is ill-defined. For example, we model site-effects as random variables from a common distribution. Is the number of parameters 2 (the mean and variance of the common distribution) or is it the number of sites (we need to estimate the individual site effects). Furthermore shrinkage in Bayesian models implies that the effective number of site estimates is smaller than the number of sites. A similar problem occurs with the site-year effects.

If you count the individual year effects, the individual site effects, and the individual site-year effects as separate parameters, this gives a total parameter count of 299 which is more than the number of data points.

The Bayesian output includes a measure \(pD\) defined as the effective number of parameters, i.e. after accounting for shrinkage. We obtain \(pD\)=238.1 which is considerably less and accounts for shrinkage (Spiegelhalter et al. 2002). This gives an over dispersion value of \[OD = \frac{Dispersion}{\textit{\# data points}-\textit{pD}}\] which gives \(OD=\) 4.4. This value is slightly above 2 indicating some evidence of over dispersion, but generally speaking is acceptable.

Some of the expected number of illegally killed elephants are very small which can inflate the numerator. A histogram of the individual components of the Dispersion numerator:

shows that the fit is generally good, with only a few site years where the contribution is large. The (few) site-years where the observed dispersion component is > 1 are shown below and are acceptable in terms of goodness of fit.

Site-years with largest discrepancy in fit
Site ID Year Total number of carcasses Number of Illegal Carcasses Observed PIKE Estimated PIKE Estimated Number of Illegal Carcasses Contribution to dispersion
MBJ 2016 17 0 0.0 0.06 1.01 1.01
WYD 2017 38 0 0.0 0.03 1.08 1.08
KUI 2014 2 2 1.0 0.48 0.97 1.10
MBJ 2011 8 4 0.5 0.30 2.37 1.12
SKP 2017 1 1 1.0 0.35 0.35 1.19
XBN 2015 3 0 0.0 0.40 1.19 1.19
WAY 2003 8 0 0.0 0.15 1.19 1.19
MBJ 2015 14 0 0.0 0.09 1.26 1.26
XBN 2003 3 3 1.0 0.52 1.56 1.32
DHG 2004 2 1 0.5 0.14 0.27 1.95

These generally occur when no illegally killed elephants are reported with an intermediate number of total carcasses reported where the model predicts a non-zero PIKE. Refer to the earlier sections to look at the individual sites reported here.

6.4.2 Overdispersion due to 0 counts

The omnibus test is a general goodness-of-fit measure. The same logic can be used to investigate specific aspects of the fit. In particular, the number of times that the number of illegally killed elephants is reported as 0 is examined.

There were 96 cases over all sites and all years where the number of illegally killed elephant carcasses was reported as zero. After fitting the model, for each sample from the posterior, we simulate the number of illegally killed elephants in the same way as in the omnibus goodness of fit: \[IC.sim_{site.year} \sim Binomial( TC_{site.year}\times\pi_{site.year})\] and count the number of times a count of 0 is obtained. This is compared to the observed number of times a 0 is obtained.

The number of 0 counts is on the higher side, but not unusual relative to that seen from simulated data.

6.5 Spatial correlation among site effects

The (random) site effects have been modelled as independent random effects without explicitly accounting for the spatial structure of the data. However, we find that sites that are close geographically have similar site effects.

Sites that have PIKE consistently above the continental average are labelled as Above the mean; sites that have PIKE consistently below the continental average are labelled as Below the mean.

We notice that sites that are close geographically tend to have similar site effects (size of dot) and in the same direction (above or below the mean, color of dots). This implies there is a spatial correlation among the site effects that has not been directly accounted for in the analysis.

The current analysis is still valid, but inefficient because it has not used the spatial correlation to improve inference. If spatial autocorrelation is explicitly modelled, then information is shared among sites that are geographically close, i.e., if the PIKE increases in one site, then spatial autocorrelation would imply that it would tend to also increase in a nearby site. Of course, if the sites are in different countries with different levels of enforcement or other covariates that impact PIKE, an explicit spatial autocorrelation could introduce a spurious relationship between the PIKE in the two sites unless these other factors (law enforcement etc.) are also modelled. The explicit spatial autocorrelation models rapidly become more complex to account for these features.

Because the current analysis treats all sites as independent (rather than spatially correlated), the uncertainty in the overall yearly PIKE is slightly smaller than from a model with explicity spatial autocorrelation because the effective number of sites used in computing the overall yearly PIKE is smaller when autocorrelation is explicitly modelled. This in turn, implies that the uncertainty of a trend (e.g. trend in the last five years) in the currently model may be slightly understated as well and the posterior belief in a trend will be higher in the current model compared to the model with an explicity spatial autocorrelation. We believe such effects are minor given the spase data at many sites, the large amount of missing site.years and the potential breaking of spatial autocorrelation across country borders.

A potential improvement to the current analysis may be to add another level of random effects (country effects) so that points from the same country that have related site effects then experience a common country effect. This model is currently under investigation.

6.6 Site effects vs number of carcasses observed

A plot of the estimated site effects vs. the total number of carcasses observed over the year is:

This plot shows that the uncertainty in the site effects declines with the total number of carcasses observed (as expected), and a random scatter about 0 (also as expected). There are a few MIKE sites with extreme site effects as labelled in the plot.

6.7 Autocorrelation in year.site effects

This model assumes that \(Year.Site\) effects are independent from year-to-year. However, local effects may last for several years, and so there may be autocorrelation present in the \(Year.Site\) effects.

A plot of the \(Year.Site_i\) vs. the \(Year.Site_{i-1}\) (i.e. a lag 1 plot) is:

shows a very model correlation over time which is sufficiently small that is not a problem. Note that only those site-years where data are collected are used in the above plot.

6.8 Year.Site effect for each site

A plot of the \(Year.Site\) effect for each site:

shows that only a few years had PIKE values within a site that could be considered unusual for that site.

6.9 Observed vs. predicted PIKE

A plot of observed PIKE in each year.site vs. the predicted PIKE is:

The fit is generally very good. For site-years where the number of carcasses was very small (\(<10\)) and the observed PIKE was 0 or 1, the estimated PIKE is pulled towards the yearly average for that year. For site-years with large number of carcasses (\(>25\)) the estimated PIKE matches closely with the observed PIKE. For site-years with intermediate number of carcasses, the estimates are shrunk slightly towards the mean for that year.

This can also be seen in the plots of observed and fitted PIKE for the individual MIKE sites:

There are several interesting patterns that illustrate the features of the model.

  • Site NIL. This site reports nearly every year with a large number of carcasses (large blue circles). The estimated yearly site-level PIKE closely follows the observed data (as expected).

  • Site CHR. In some years, this site reports a large number of carcasses and the estimated yearly site-level PIKE for these years matches the observed PIKE. In some years, the observed PIKE based on large number of carcasses is above the continental marginal mean (e.g. 2007) and in some some years it is below the continental marginal mean (e.g. 2012. On average, this site tracks the continental trend. So in years where this site only reports on a few carcasses (small red circles) and the observed PIKE is mostly 0 or 1, the estimated PIKE is close to the continental trend. For example, with a small number of carcasses examined, a value of 2 illegally killed elephants from 2 carcasses examined (observed PIKE of 1) is consistent with an estimated PIKE closer to the continental marginal PIKE. Notice that in years with a small number of carcasses reported, the credible interval for the estimated site-level PIKE is very wide.

  • Site CHU. This site mostly has smallish sample sizes, but the observed PIKE is consistently close to 0. The estimated site-level PIKE is then also close to 0 in years with no reports, but notice the wide credible intervals.

In summary, in years with many carcasses reported, the estimated site-year PIKE will closely match the observed site-year PIKE. In years with few carcasses reported, the estimated site-year PIKE will be pulled towards the continental trend after accounting for the observed relationship between this sites PIKE and the continental trend.

7 References

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